Your new-home deposit isn't protected the same way in every province

Our Canada home warranty guide and our provincial pages on Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta all cover the mandatory statutory warranty a builder has to carry once a new home is built. This page covers a narrower, earlier moment: what happens to the money you paid before the home was ever finished, if the builder goes bankrupt or simply never delivers — and whether that money is actually protected depends heavily on which province you're in.

Deposit protection is a different thing from the warranty itself

Our warranty company bankruptcy page covers what happens if the company backing an already-purchased warranty fails after you own the home. Deposit protection is an earlier, separate risk: money paid toward a home purchase — a reservation deposit, a pre-construction deposit — that's never delivered because the builder itself goes under, or otherwise fails to complete or convey the property, before you ever take possession. Not every province's mandatory new-home warranty program treats that risk the same way.

Ontario: a specific, tiered dollar cap built into Tarion's coverage

Tarion's deposit protection is a built-in part of Ontario's mandatory new-home warranty, not a separate purchase. For a freehold home under a purchase agreement signed on or after January 1, 2018, a deposit is protected up to $60,000 where the home's price is $600,000 or less, rising to 10% of the purchase price, capped at $100,000, above that threshold; an agreement signed before January 1, 2018 is protected up to a flat $40,000 instead. A condominium unit gets two layers of protection rather than one: first, the trust requirement under Ontario's Condominium Act, which generally requires a builder to hold a condo deposit in a lawyer's trust account; second, if that trust requirement wasn't actually honoured, Tarion's own warranty backstops the deposit up to $20,000. Either way, the trigger is the same: the builder goes bankrupt, or fundamentally breaches the purchase agreement.

Quebec: GCR protects a deposit too, but the single-family cap is meaningfully lower

Our Quebec new-home warranty page covers GCR (Garantie de construction résidentielle), the single nonprofit administering Quebec's mandatory new-residential-building warranty since 2015. That plan reimburses a deposit paid before delivery if the contractor can't complete or hand over the property — the same basic protection Tarion provides. Where Quebec's figure differs meaningfully from Ontario's is the cap: GCR's deposit-protection limit for a single-family home buyer is $50,000, a lower ceiling than Ontario's $60,000–$100,000 range for a comparably priced home. On a higher-value build specifically, that gap between what you paid as a deposit and what GCR's cap actually covers is worth doing the arithmetic on before you pay, not after something goes wrong.

Alberta: deposit protection exists, but it's an optional add-on, not a mandatory feature

Our Alberta home warranty page covers the New Home Buyer Protection Act's mandatory post-possession coverage. That mandatory coverage doesn't include deposit or pre-possession protection by default. Deposit insurance in Alberta — protecting payments made to secure a building commitment, generally up to $100,000 where it's purchased — is instead an optional product that some of the province's own approved new-home warranty providers choose to offer on top of the mandatory coverage, not something the province requires every builder to carry. An Alberta buyer who assumes their deposit is automatically protected the way an Ontario or Quebec buyer's is can be wrong about that, simply because nobody asked the specific question.

British Columbia: a different mechanism entirely — a trust requirement, not a warranty feature

Our British Columbia home warranty page covers the mandatory post-possession "2-5-10" warranty required under BC's Homeowner Protection Act. That mandatory coverage, like Alberta's, generally doesn't reach a pre-possession deposit either. BC instead handles a pre-sale deposit through a separate statute, the Real Estate Development Marketing Act, in force since January 1, 2005: a developer is generally required to hold a purchaser's deposit in trust until the sale completes. A developer can apply for permission to release that trust money early, to help finance construction, but only by putting a substitute protection in place first — commonly deposit insurance covering the released amount. The legal mechanism is genuinely different from Ontario's or Quebec's warranty-based cap, and it's worth confirming directly which one, if either, actually applies to a specific BC purchase.

What this means before you pay a deposit on a new home

Don't assume a builder being "warranty-registered" by itself tells you anything about your deposit specifically — ask, in writing, exactly which mechanism protects it: a warranty-program dollar cap (Ontario's or Quebec's model), a trust-account requirement (BC's baseline), a separately purchased deposit-insurance product (Alberta's optional add-on), or, in the worst case, none of the above if your specific purchase doesn't trigger any of them. Get the actual dollar figure and the name of whatever's backing it before you pay — the same "verify the specific number, not the general reassurance" principle behind point 4 of our standard.

Before you pay a deposit on a pre-construction home: ask the builder or developer directly which specific mechanism protects that payment, and get the dollar cap in writing. "Tarion-registered" or "GCR-registered" tells you the post-closing warranty exists — it doesn't by itself tell you your deposit is covered, or for how much.